Bitcoin Blog a1

Saturday, April 25, 2015

To the exchange!

In order to go far with any Cryptocurrency, you need a way of buying and selling it. For most of us, this means it's time to go off to the exchange! One of the most popular exchanges is Cryptsy! This is my referral link. Based on your volume of trade, you give Cryptsy points to your referrer. If you have enough points, you can enter drawings for hardware and goodies! Or if you don’t, you can trade it for straight up bitcoins!

Now, I just use the crypto to crypto markets. In other words, I don’t deal in US dollars. To trade in USD you need to have ID, SSN and all sorts of personal information I frankly don’t want to give.

The best part is, making your account is totally free. The exchange takes a modest .27% fee for transactions. If you compare this to typical costs for stocks and other somewhat comparable examples, it is a steal!

Bigger, however, is not always best! Other exchanges are arguably better. https://poloniex.com/ for instance has lower trading fees. Currently, it looks like it is .2%. Some users assert the interface is much nicer too.

The last feature I wanted to look at on Cryptsy was Trade keys. With a trade key you can send other exchange users any time of currency with no fees and it requires no confirmations. For example my trade key is: 05f8991eb7ce90a2c059f215b079c0402c0e5282 .

Well that is what an exchange is! Next post, I will talk about using the exchange to trade!